Never Offer Your Heart
by Ku-chyan
Summary: There’s just something about being in love that overcame Spinelli in every way.


Please note that this was started when Maxie slept with Franco, and follows a bit of a different line than the show.

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**Never Offer Your Heart**

**Spinelli

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**

Maxie sleeping with Franco, in the studio, and Spinelli hadn't been there but his brain has always been too imaginative and he can see it all, how Franco would have touched her, how she would have sounded (every little noise that should have been for his ears only). Spinelli can see it painted over the inside of his eyelids and splattered all over his heart.

He thinks _I can't believe she would do this to me_, but well, that's not true, is it? Maxie is Maxie and he had known that, and somewhere in the back of his mind, despite all his talk of complete faith, this doubt must have been sitting, waiting, because he doesn't feel that surprised at all. Just heartbroken, mostly.

There's just something about being in love that overcame Spinelli in every way. This is a part of that, he decides, although his inner optimist shrieks in grief. Maybe everybody who falls in love will inevitably hit this rock bottom. Maybe it's just Port Charles where nobody is allowed to be happy. Or maybe it's just Maxie who can't ever seem to –

No. He won't think that. He can't. Is this the worst part – still being in love? Because he is, he is so in love with Maxie Jones that he thinks he must be in shock, maybe all his body is stock still and his brain hasn't remembered to tell his heart it can stop with all that nonsense.

Maybe he wouldn't have ever found out and they would have gone on forever and forever, him happy and oblivious, her guilt ridden and remorseful, and what then? Would that have been better than this, this knowing and being so hurt? He's only asking these questions to keep himself busy, to stop himself from going mad, to stop himself from crying or drinking a bottle of whisky or throwing himself off a balcony – all these stupid things that lovesick men like him are wont to do in the heat of the moment. There's probably no real answer. Both endings suck.

He knows because Franco told him. It makes sense, that – the smug look on Franco's face, the satisfied glint in his eyes, the way he'd talked about Maxie's skin and her taste and her smell – he'd wanted to hurt Spinelli. Maxie had made sense in a way that she hadn't for weeks – all her tears, all her distance, all her strange, unexplained remorse. She didn't lie on confrontation though, she cried and cried, and he cried, and they were both crying, just a pathetic pair of people proving that love isn't always enough.

Maybe there are things in life that end badly – always. Spinelli likes to think that there are only shadows because there is light, only rain so there can be rainbows. He doesn't always think like this, not right away, but here's what most people don't understand, that sometimes optimism is a choice, like happiness, and sometimes you have to dig around through all the baggage in your head before you find it. It's hard to find now, when his whole body's aching from bone to skin with something he has no word for.

Spinelli doesn't want to be sad. He doesn't want to think about the way their bodies must have moved together, dancing that dance that broke Spinelli's' heart when he wasn't the leading man. He thinks to himself _I don't have to be sad_ (as if it works that way), he thinks _it's not the worst thing that could have happened_, although he can't think of anything particularly worse. ( not true, as he thinks of something worse anytime he tries to think of an alternative, like Maxie dead, like that picture being real, and it all runs around in head until he doesn't even know what he's thinking of)

And it's not that he's angry. Don't think that. He's not an angry person, and he can't — well, it just doesn't seem like there's any room inside him left for anger. If he was a different man (a stronger man? a man with a backbone, with a firm foot, with a brain that didn't constantly get all looped up in the business of his heart?) then maybe he would tell Maxie what he's sure a different man would say, that it's certainly not okay to sleep with another man. That no, he hadn't really expected this, not ever, not now after their non-marriage, not now after he was so sure that she at least felt half, if not more, of the same love he felt for her. And maybe that's what makes him a stupid man, as well as a sad one.

Spinelli still wants to hold her, is that wrong? He wants to rest his head on her shoulder and smell her hair product, her perfume, and not think of anything bad. He doesn't want to talk about it, not now, not ever. He doesn't want to sleep with Anne Hathaway, because she's beautiful and lovely and very much not Maxie.

"I'm an idiot." Spinelli laughs. "And I can't stop myself."

Is that what love is? This whole time he'd thought it was something grand, romantic, spine tingling, but is it really this? Something that takes your control and your heart and dangles them out of reach?

"Spinelli?" Maxie asks, pausing in her shuffle of magazines, of Vogue and Glamour and just a pile of beautiful women that Spinelli wishes he wanted. "What are you talking about?"

_I'm an idiot_, Spinelli thinks of telling her, _because I love you_. But he wouldn't, couldn't say something so cruel to her, not ever, not even if she cut his heart out and swallowed it whole.

"Nothing." He says and only watches as she turns away, still beautiful enough to make his breath catch.

* * *

_If you find yourself  
in love  
with a person  
who eats hearts  
these things  
you must do:  
Freeze your heart  
immediately.  
Let him-next time  
he examines your chest—  
find your heart cold  
flinty and unappetizing.  
Refrain from kissing lest he in revenge  
dampen the spark  
in your soul._

_**Never Offer Your Heart to Someone Who Eats Hearts  
** by Alice Walker_


End file.
